In this sweeping approach to the history of disease, historian J. N. Hays chronicles perceptions and responses to plague and pestilence over two thousand years of Western history. Hays frames disease as a multidimensional construct, situated at the intersection of history, politics, culture, and medicine, and rooted in mentalities and social relations as much as in biological conditions of pathology.

He shows how diseases affect social and political change, reveal social tensions, and are mediated both within and outside the realm of scientific medicine.